Hello? ? ? ? Is Anybody Home ?? ?

cw: i put your question to my older son, who has the same notebook as yours (he is, BTW, a second generation audiophile, as well). his first concern with your proposed setup is power consumption. unless your notebook is running on an ac adapter, you'll drain your batteries quite quickly. he listens to mp3's and watches dvd's when traveling, using $100.00 sony headphones. not as good, of course, as top-of-the-line grado's but a helluva lot better than you'll get watching movies on any model boeing or airbus. it's another question entirely if you're looking at getting high-quality sound from your desk-based pc, but that's not the subject of your thread. in any event, i've asked my son to do some further research, which i'll post if and when i learn the results. happy computin' -kelly

One thing you can do is get one of the USB Audio devices for your laptop, it plugs in to the USB port and produces reasonable line-level audio, which will work fine as the input to your amp. Whether it is compatible with your DVD codes is something I do not know, but it will work fine with MP3 playback and DIVX encoded movies, in short, with anything that will play back through the windows sound system. You can find these little gadgets at compusa and such, for $99 or so. I don't remember off the top of the head who makes them.

A suggestion for making your battery last: Turn of everything you don't absolutely need, like IR port, printer port, serial port, firewire, you name it. Turn your screen brightness down, and if you're playing from media other than HD, set the sleep timer on your harddisk very short. If only listening, have your screen turned off.

On my 505G with extended battery, running the machine on 25% CPU, screen off, all ports off, harddisk not spinning and using just the PCMCIA slot and CPU, the batteries last nearly 7 hours, as opposed to two with everything on. On my 505LS, the battery lasts 55 minutes with the machine going full speed, but almost 3 hours with screen and HD off, and CPU running at 25% speed.

BTW, you do get some really funny looks when juggling two seemingly identical laptops on an airplane... Good thing noone has yet figured out what wireless ethernet is, I am sure if they knew, I wouldn't be allowed to use it.

Niels.

Is anybody out there?